DreadOut Remastered Collection

Trailers can make or break a game, and a great one can create immense hype, think COD Modern Warfare 2 back in 2009. The right framing and editing can make any game look fantastic in a trailer. So, when I saw the trailers for the original releases of DreadOut 1 and 2, I was stunned. These indie horror titles looked to have an impressive concept, varied gameplay, and cool story. I never played these games back long ago, but with a remastered collection now on PS5, I thought it was due time to check them out.

And honestly, I have thoughts …


What is the DreadOut Remastered Collection?

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of ambition here, heart and soul, and I’m always highly thankful and supportive of smaller developers looking to make it onto the scene. Tormented Souls is one of my favourite horror games in recent years, and that was created by a small team, who learned Unity from Youtube.

The premise of the DreadOut games is compelling, with many notes taken from the Fatal Frame (or Project Zero, if you’re fancy) games. Where you play as a young person caught up fighting ghosts in a spooky location, with trusty technology! The trust tech is a 2014 smartphone! This collection has two DreadOut games, including the original and its sequel/missing chapter Dreadout: Keepers of the Dark. This is a slightly revamped, slightly tweaked, and polished duo of classic indie horror games for the current generation of consoles.

What struck me most with the trailers for both games, was the variety of locations, diverse gameplay mechanics, and the concept of defeating ghosts with cameras is something I always love! And both games, I can see there is a lot of creativity, and respect for the genre, making a highly engaging horror experience that always has you thinking each step of the terrifying way.

But these games are still pretty rough in presentation and design ….


Oh great! There are spooky ghosts in this abandoned town!

In this supernatural tale, we play Linda, a high school student trapped in a spooky town, where the only residents are evil ghosts. Linda wakes up in a rusty old shack, and after getting a distressing call from her closest friend, sets off to find her class and escape the wicked down. Armed with her trusty smartphone and an SLR camera, Linda must fight the forces of evil, solve mysterious puzzles, and rescue her friends.

What we get is a classic, tried and tested formula of a horror plot, and while not original, the lore and mystery behind the abandoned town are quite fascinating, even if the payoff is not all that exciting. Linda is likeable enough, but the town and evil presence harbouring it, are the standouts of this ghost story. I was hooked, terrified, and found many of the ghostly visitors to be utterly unnerving and their presence haunting me throughout was quite riveting. The pacing is something of a small issue though, as the game jump-starts with horror quite quickly, and never fully explores certain aspects of the town’s ghosts. You will start seeing ghosts, and there’s no build-up, or proper pacing to make them feel validated. They’re cool visually and do the spooky stuff right, but I remember playing Project Zero for the first time, and the build-up/reveal of the first, second, and other ghosts to be chilling even to this day.

There is a decent mystery here, and lots of theories as to the actual core of what the hell happened, seem to be still ignited to this day on fan forums. I like the spooky town, and titbits of lore, and to be fair, the Project Zero games were sorted the same where the protagonists weren’t all that compelling and felt more like fodder for the ghosts. Linda is perfectly fine and the supporting cast does its job to heighten the tension and narrative beats. With Keepers of the Dark, we’re taken away to a far more dangerous, and vastly more interesting location this time around. Linda returns to face off against the Mysterious “Lady in Red” within a mirror realm. And oh man, the story gets way more confusing, to say the least.

To be fair, you can follow the plot, but it’s just how so much more lore is crammed in and to me, something didn’t make much sense. It is still pretty cool to see an expansion to this world and get even more ghosts to fight and unnerving mirror verse locations to explore. But like I said, this feels more like cut content from the original story that didn’t fully work, only for the developers to just put it back in and say, if it works it's canon, if not then it’s just a weird mirror verse add-on you can ignore.

Overall, there are some great elements to the narrative, I love the ghosts, their lore, and the town’s evil history, and the bones of the mystery are solid and enjoyable, even when it sort of goes off the rails and bit, and ends up not as exciting as the rest.


A diamond in the rough


Now, we usually have a high expectation when it comes to remasters right? We look at recent examples such as The Thing, and the Tomb Raider remasters. Seeing as DreadOut released a decade ago, I was expecting there to be a fair amount of visual polishing and a good facelift… but that wasn’t the case.

So to be fair, the game is meant to invoke a PS2 aesthetic and it still definitely does, or more so a PS3 feel to it. And maybe that’s the intended outcome for it to look like it was lifted from 6th to 7th generation. But I feel more could have been done to improve the game's UI, and include other quality-of-life features. As I mentioned, I didn’t play the original releases, but have read a lot of complaints suffered in the original games, and I don’t think most of them were resolved.

Visually the game is fine, with some elements being quite stunning, such as the ghosts. But the drab colour palette and overcast of shadows mean the game looks visually cluttered, and obscure. This is a shame as at times there are genuinely horrifying visuals and spectacular world-building. It’s a shame a lot of areas are so unengaging and going back to Project Zero, that game made some nice aesthetic choices, enhancing the mood with lighting and colour choices which made the game world feel incredibly cold and dead. But we get a lot of grey, slick shadows that look off, or so little light that we can’t see anything.

It's definitely a mixed bag, and there is plenty of good, and not so good here for presentation.


Ghosts don’t like the flash setting on your phone

Where DreadOut does shine (not a camera phone pun) is with the gameplay, and while there is absolutely some roughness with it, the core mechanics, and set-pieces do indeed nail the horror experience, when there isn’t something utterly annoying coming up with the level design. I feel the weirdness, and variety do bring up the gameplay side, which is often slightly let down by confusing level design, and a lack of a clear goal, or even the faintest hint on what you need to do (which even the first Resident Evil did).

The core mechanic is the camera, and how this reveals information and pushes back enemies and defeats bosses. There are a lot of events centred on this mechanic, from banishing a ghost on your back by taking pictures in a mirror, to fending off a man/pig creature chasing you through an old school. The amount of scenarios is admirable if not a little jarring. This one-and-done method of events and gameplay encounters can leave you in a sort of trial-and-error loop that you’ll either love or dislike and to be honest I was in the middle of it.

Some moments worked incredibly well, while others didn’t. Some of the worst were instances where I was pursued or attacked by smaller enemies that felt overwhelming and flat-out broken at times. But then you have the bigger enemies, the larger creatures that hunt you down, and taking a shot to push them back while you make a quick escape was enthralling and brilliant.

And DreadOut is a genuinely scary game, with fantastic moments where you have to line up a scene and take a photo, revealing something awful once that flash dies down. These little moments again work incredibly well, building tension, and paying off as a lateral component. The only thing that does hold back the camera mechanic compared to Project Zero, is the lack of interactions with it, aside from taking photos. I know this was 10 years ago, but even then phones could do a lot more and there isn’t much else going on with the phone aside from the basics. In Project Zero they included different types of film for stronger attacks, and this added some tactical edge to the combat.

Still, the most is made with the smartphone, with the scares, encounters with bosses, and puzzles all being terrific. But much is let down slightly by the confusing level design, an abundance of annoying enemies, and a clear lack of knowledge on what you need to do.


Overall?


DreadOut is a love letter to survival horror of old, not the classic fixed camera, PS1 era of the genre, but rather the rickety, janky, but charming PS2 era. Where we got a whole heap of innovative titles, that for better or worse left their mark. I thoroughly enjoyed many set pieces, the lore, the spooky ghosts, and the genuine tension and dread that followed me throughout my playtime. But with awkward level design, poor sense of direction, and a story which had potential, but became cumbersome by the end, falls short of being a true and through classic.

I can see why DreadOut is a cult classic, and why it should get praise for what it does right, and this remaster is a nice way to revisit it on next-gen hardware … but the package and refinements could have been much better.


++ Awesome bosses, and set-pieces, with varied gameplay elements
+ Cool lore and atmosphere
+ Two games for one!

- The story gets quite confusing by the second game
- Level design hiccups and dull/unfocused objectives
- Presentation is not great in this “remaster”


The publisher kindly provided a review copy of DreadOut Remastered Collection.